Henrietta Buckmaster

The Lion in the Stone by Henrietta Buckmaster (novel). The secretary-general of the UN is the protagonist of this post-Vietnam war novel. Devan Moragodo, a Ceylonese diplomat, heads up this powerful international body and is pleased to preside over what appears to be a moment of peace, one which he hopes to preserve. But beneath the world’s placid appearance, a conflict between China and the Soviet Union is brewing over control of Mongolia, a conflict which threatens to explode in the form of a nuclear conflict. This novel explores the theory that loving persuasion can supplant the violent clash of war. We are offered a look at what goes on behind the scenes at the UN, complete with a compelling cast of characters from all over the world. The book’s tension comes from the high-wire, nerve jangling art of diplomacy and the unorthodox romance of Devan and his own …

Wait Until Evening by Henrietta Buckmaster (novel). The title comes from a quote from Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex: “One must wait until evening to see how splendid the day has been.” The title gives hope that the protagonist, Catherine Mills, will find solace at the end of her challenging ordeal. We are pulled into this story as Catherine stumbles in shock from a terrifying car ride and accident. The dark, foggy British heath is a match for the confusion in her mind as this American instinctively follows a light to a house where she might find another human. She is literally dumbstruck and has trouble remembering anything, including her own identity. Or maybe she’s just not talking. As clearer images distinguish themselves from the mist, we discover that she has put herself in the competent hands of a Danish chemist and that she came to England on a …

Paul: A Man who changed the World by Henrietta Buckmaster. As a Lutheran minister’s daughter, I grew up hearing a reading from Paul’s letters every Sunday in church. Like Buckmaster, I found Paul’s epistles compelling. Who can forget his “faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love”? His transformation from Saul, the persecutor of Christians, to Paul, the greatest of all evangelists, provided the narrative that spread Christianity around the Mediterranean, from Jerusalem and Damascus, site of the blinding light, to Rome.

What we know of Paul comes from the epistles themselves and from the Acts of the Apostles, about half of which is about Paul. Paul traveled, reaching out to the gentiles, and establishing churches as he went. As we travel with Paul in this book, we are oriented by the maps at the beginning of each chapter. Travel in the first century was …

Women who Shaped History by Henrietta Buckmaster (must have been sometime in the 1920’s) This book contains profiles of six nineteenth-century women who pried open the door to male-dominated arenas, making access a little more possible for the women who followed. Dorothea Dix took on the plight of mentally ill women. She visited the institutions where these women were housed (some supported by Quakers) amassing data which led to her demands for states and finally the federal government to invest in decent hospitals to tend to the destitute mentally ill. In 1843, to her dismay, her old friend Franklin Pierce vetoed her bill. She went on to organize with Elizabeth Blackwell a medical system to treat soldiers during the Civil War.

Buckmaster recounts the story of Blackwell, whose struggle to become a doctor is a profile in courage. “A blank wall of social and professional antagonism faces a woman ph…